Health Law

most disturbing thing

Posted on May 05, 2009
Off Topic: Perhaps the most disturbing thing I've ever seen. Last week I was in New York for the CIT Healthcare Finance Conference, a gathering of small healthcare businesses and potential financing sources, where company executives give short presentations on their companies and then meet with possible investors or lenders...

Virginia Rx data breach, hackers, ransom

Posted on May 05, 2009
Virginia Rx Data Breach, Hackers, and Ransom: It seems some hackers got into the Virginia state program that tracks prescription drug use to try to locate prescription drug abusers and drug-seekers. They took down all the data and left up a ransom note, asking for $10,000,000...

Swine Flu

Posted on April 30, 2009
Swine Flu: Don't panic. Wash your hands regularly, and use hand sanitizers if you're not near a good clean rest room. Stay home (work from home) if you're sick. That's it. I predict that American H1N1 flu deaths will be less than 1% of the average annual US flu death toll.

Red Flags Rule

Posted on April 30, 2009
Red Flags Rule: FTC announces delay in enforcement date from May 1 (i.e., tomorrow) to August 1. In the interim, they'll provide a template for "creditors" who are at low risk for identity theft. I don't think this is the relief the AMA was looking for.

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doctor shortage

Posted on April 28, 2009
Doctor shortage, and what it portends for healthcare reform.I saw this in James Taranto's column in the WSJ today:Does President Obama understand economics? This passage, from a Friday speech onhigher education, suggests not:"And yet, in a paradox of American life, atthe very moment it's never been more important to have a quality highereducation, the cost of that kind of education has never

Air Force One Fly-by

Posted on April 28, 2009
Totally Off-Topic, but . . . well, stunning.Which raises a couple of thoughts:1. If scaring the crap out of a terrorist is torture, what's scaring the crap out of thousands of New Yorkers? A photo op.2. What's the carbon footprint of this little photo shoot? More or less than every Hummer in America idling for an hour? Just curious...

Sebelius confirmed

Posted on April 28, 2009
Sebelius confirmed as HHS secretary.

offshore transcription

Posted on April 20, 2009
Offshore Transcription: This shouldn't surprise anyone, but much medical transcription is done overseas. Obviously, there are HIPAA issues. And there is some "scare language" in the article ("Asian transcriptionists often strain to understand what American doctors have dictated...

HHS issues guidance on what makes

Posted on April 17, 2009
HHS issues guidance on what makes PHI "unsecured" for new data breach rules: This is hot off the presses, and I haven't had time to read it yet, but a quick scan leads me to believe that my original impression was correct: you've got to encrypt for ePHI to be "secured...

Moses Cone Data Breach: Another

Posted on April 15, 2009
Moses Cone Data Breach: Another stolen laptop, another hospital scrambling to offer credit reporting to patients whose information was stolen. The data was password-protected, and in a software program that requires some training to use, but it wasn't encrypted; does that count as "unsecured PHI" under the new HIPAA rules post-ARRA? We won't know for sure until the regs come out...

Privacy Rules hinder EMR adoption

Posted on April 15, 2009
Do Privacy Rules Hinder EMR Adoption? Apparently they do. This all goes back to my underlying issue of privacy versus healthcare delivery. Markets work better with free-flowing information, and most systems do too. Perfect privacy (nobody knows your PHI, not even your doctor) is bad for your healthcare...

Reaction to HITECH and ARRA

Posted on April 13, 2009
What's your reaction been to ARRA and HITECH? The so-called Stimulus Bill (ARRA) contained the acronymiously adventurous HITECH provisions (that's the Health Information Technology for Econimic and Clinical Health Act), which strengthened HIPAA penalties, added more potential HIPAA regulators and enforcers, and made more people subject to HIPAA...

OT: Health Reform: here's a pretty

Posted on April 08, 2009
OT: Health Reform: here's a pretty good article on healthcare reform. I still doubt we'll see healthcare reform, any more than we'll see cap-and-trade in energy or the US adopting the new version of Kyoto (Copenhagen this time), mainly because there's too much anectode, too much hyperbole, to many wish lists, and not enough serious thought...

ARRA text

Posted on April 07, 2009
(So-called) Stimulus Bill Text: As I noted below, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was actually passed with a bunch of handwritten notes on it changing some of the language, some if it substantively (the country's in the very best of hands)...

Medical records at closed physician practice

Posted on April 03, 2009
What happens to the records when a doctor closes shop? It depends on how it happens, but it can be a messy, troubling situation. A doctor in Acton, Mass. abruptly shut his practice because the state was chasing him for practicing without a license. He just abandoned the records, and they were about to be shredded when a local hospital stepped in to take possession of them...

Internet security generally

Posted on April 03, 2009
Internet Security Generally: As you work your way through the Red Flags Rule, now is a good time to rethink your Security Rule policies and procedures, or at least give a quick think about whether your original security risk analysis is still applicable, accurate, and effective...

Red Flags Rule

Posted on April 03, 2009
Red Flags Rule: You may or may not know about this (or may or may not care), but you better have made a decision as to whether you're going to take care of this by May 1. I'd suggest you do so. And while you're at it, think about rethinking your Security Rule policies and procedures, too...

Upcoming Gigs: I keep meaning to

Posted on April 02, 2009
Upcoming Gigs: I keep meaning to post on here my upcoming speaking gigs; I don't just blog HIPAA, I talk it too. Anyway, here's my current agenda:April 21: I'll be in NYC at the 4th Annual CIT Healthcare Conference, hearing new market entrants pitch their businesses and asking HIPAA-related questions...

From the World Privacy Forum: an

Posted on April 01, 2009
From the World Privacy Forum: an patient's guide to HIPAA. With some useful information for the non-HIPAAcrat.

Octomom snoopers

Posted on March 31, 2009
Kaiser fires Octomom snoopers: Good.

NEJM report on EMR adoption in hospital

Posted on March 26, 2009
How complete is hospital adoption of EMR technology? According to this report by the New England Journal of Medicine, not very. 1.5% for complete EMR adoption, with Computerized Physician Order Entry (the easiest and most cost-effective sliver of the EMR universe) adopted by only 17% of hospitals...

Mass. General Data Breach: Another

Posted on March 24, 2009
Mass. General Data Breach: Another day, another data breach. This time, it's limited to 66 Massachusetts General Hospital patients. Their paper records were left on a subway train. Unlike most data breaches, where the concern is social security numbers or other information that could be used for identity theft, the data here was billing records, which do contain name and date of birth, but

Slightly OT: The (so-called) Stimulus

Posted on March 23, 2009
Slightly OT: The (so-called) Stimulus Bill. You can read below my somewhat extensive posts on the HIPAA provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (sometimes called the Stimulus Bill, the Porkulus Bill, and various other names, but in the spirit of neutrality we call it ARRA)...

Miami Data Breach

Posted on March 23, 2009
Miami Data Breach: Somebody stole a hard drive from Jackson Memorial Hospital with drivers' license data on hospital visitors. No social security numbers, which is good. And it's hard to tell if the information was PHI, based just on what I read in the story...

cellphone texting by physician office

Posted on March 23, 2009
Physician office texting: Here's an interesting story of a physician's office using cell phone text-messaging for patient notifications. Certainly do-able, and probably a cost-saver, but you must make sure you're cellphone numbers are good, you get buy-in from the patients (with easy opt-out), minimize the information flow over the text process (don't discuss test results, just notify of the

NoPP on cd = written?

Posted on March 20, 2009
NoPP on CD: Just received a fairly interesting question on the requirement to deliver a notice of privacy practices (NoPP). HIPAA requires covered entities to provide them to the people whose health information the covered entity will be handling (patients of providers, beneficiaries of health plans)...

David Blumenthal named NC

Posted on March 20, 2009
NC Named: David Blumenthal, M.D., has been named to be the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (i.e., the NC in ONCHIT). John Halamka is happy. He's certainly a solid Massachusetts Democrat.

Federal healthcare data breach re nuclear employees

Posted on March 18, 2009
Here's a Healthcare Data Breach With a Twist: It seems medical data on a bunch of federal Department of Energy nuclear power employees might have been lost. OK, I can think of several way this could be worse. . . .

New Data Breach rules and preemption

Posted on March 18, 2009
Do the New Data Breach Rules Pre-Empt State Data Breach Laws? (And if so, partially or completely?) Excellent question and answer from Edward Shay of Post & Schell: In an exchange on the AHLA's HIT listserv this morning, hipaacrat Shay had the following to say (HITECH is the HIPAA portion of ARRA):"Yesterday on the HITECH Part I conference call, Dan Orenstein asked me if I thought that HITECH

PHRs get patients involved

Posted on March 18, 2009
PHRs Get Patients Involved in Their Own Care: This makes sense, and is one of the good reasons why increased use and access of personal health records (as opposed to electronic medical records or electronic health records*, which are the records in doctors' offices and hospitals) is a good thing...

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